16 comments:

These are the neighborhoods most people would prefer not to look too closely at, but in my recent r & r stint at the Trauma Center the human universality of the denizens of these neighborhoods surrounded me on every wailing or stoic gurney.

Yes, the events of yesterday in Oakland suggest a powder train of violence in the air. A congruence of International Workers Day, an immigrants' rights protest originating in the largely Latino neighborhood near Fruitvale Station (see fourth photo in this post) and the first indications of a revenant Occupy Movement resulted in a day of multiple flashpoints.

The quickness of reaction is apparent in the bit of video with the story here.

"Evocative of..." would be my comment also, along with echoing the rest of what Don said. I'm fascinated to see the overturned trash containers. On my drives to and from Jane's school every day, I have noticed overturned empty trash bins. Is this a trend? The title of the photo is very amusing and I really like the title of this piece. I find it interesting also that I can't tell whether the person in the top photo is opening up the shop or closing it forever. Curtis

Oh, these photos are the kind that hit that hollow place in the world, in the heart of the world. Here in Youngstown we have so many boarded up houses, trashed locations. But when I came back from EL Salvador, I realized that many there would love to fill even these desperate locations. To have even a leaky roof is something. Though of course they have no winter there. Still, it is such a feeling of despair that fills the soul and boggles the mind . . .

Desperate locations indeed. They seem to be sprouting up like weeds through the cracks in the concrete, everywhere around us. Coming ever nearer.

Outside the gated and walled enclaves of the zero zero zero zero one percent that is.

(Inside which perhaps the desperation takes other forms, less physical, more psychic, for all we would know... and if it did, and if we did know, would our tiny fractured hearts bleed a wee drop or two in sympathy, like those vintage plaster statues of Mary Mother of Prague, of which recovered memory provides a surprising associative collection at this moment, do you suppose?)

Michael, of course the nuns always insisted that the slender red trickle upon her tender ceramic breast was actual compassionate immaculate-maternal blood -- though we smirking lads convinced ourselves (always whistling in the devil's deep dark) it was but nail polish.